


Quiltbug

by OxfordOctopus



Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [7]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Breakfast, Bugs & Insects, Case 53, F/F, Femslash, Fluff, Lazy Mornings, Monster Anatomy, Worm Rarepair
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-07-23 05:11:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20002858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: An average morning for the Faultline Crew, through the eyes of Tailor, sometimes known as Owl.Includes passionate hand holding.





	Quiltbug

It was weird how wakefulness worked. One moment she was asleep, the train of memories and thoughts completely absent, and the next she was _awake_ , bitingly, intensely so. She didn’t dream, which apparently wasn’t unusual with Case 53s; it seemed to go either way. You either didn’t dream at all, like her, or you _dreamed_ , and those dreams were so rarely pleasant, never remembered but always fitful, close to nightmares but not quite.

Crooking her wings and stretching out all six of her arms, Tailor let her weight hang against the thick cords of her hammock. The quiet hum of machinery - _her machinery_ , she reminded herself - told her little about the time of day or the state of her project, but that could be left for later. In the little moments before the world woke up, before Faultline came to ensure she wasn’t poring over another design, bringing Newter with her in case she needed to put her under forcefully, the world was blessedly quiet. Silence was a rare and valuable thing when you lived above a nightclub, and she’d take it whenever she could get it.

Still, it wasn’t like she needed _time_ to wake up. She just _was_ or she _wasn’t_ and there was little in the way of transitory periods in between. Supposedly it had something to do with her biology, which wasn’t a surprise considering she was more carapace than skin nowadays, but it wasn’t like she couldn’t envy others who dipped in and out of a ‘sleepy’ phase. She found it awfully cute, especially on Labyrinth – the girl - for she was one even if she was nearing adulthood - was positively adorable when drowsy, dragging a thick quilt around behind her and mumbling nonsensically to others, so desperate to find a place to just _sleep_.

Tailor wondered, belatedly, if her envy towards those who could be drowsy was part of the memories she was missing. Maybe she had a fondness for something similar at one point in time, a cherished moment that she couldn’t index because it didn’t exist anymore. There were a lot of ‘maybe’s going on, but it was better to dwell on them than the things she might never know about.

She’d consider it later, maybe after she had lunch and was working on her projects again. Thinking back, apparently Melanie - Faultline, in public - was doing lunch today. A happy, and _completely involuntary_ , chirrup escaped her at the thought. Melanie always made good food in large quantities, a contrast to Gregor and Shamrock, neither of whom could cook to save their lives, both for very different reasons, and Matryoshka - Maddie, to Tailor - had once boiled a pound of potatoes, sat it down in front of everyone, and said, simply, “eat”.

There hadn’t even been salt.

Unclenching the muscle-but-not in her abdomen, Tailor wiggled in place and let a thick bead of silk bulge from the opening. A bit of adjustment later and she descended, carried down on pre-twined silk rope that had taken years to learn how to fabricate on its own. With so little in her stomach the cord itself was more or less _pure_ , a gauzy colorlessness with few to no impurities, leaving it durable but not as much as it could be.

The long mirror that defined her room told a slightly unfortunate tale about her fate. She was long, long in the way _people_ weren’t supposed to be; a humanoid figure framed by wide, fuzzy white-and-black wings and an abdomen that all but reached the floor. Her limbs were only abstractly humanoid, retaining the shape of a bicep and a forearm but made entirely out of sleek white chitin, with openings where joints would be. The joints themselves were even _less_ human, each one a ball joint closer to a doll’s than an insect's, looking almost synthetic in construction.

Her body was clouded by thick, black curly down, closer to a bird’s than a moth’s, forced out from beneath the chitinous plates and hiding what she knew was a surprisingly lithe, surprisingly _fragile_ body beneath. It was especially pronounced at her neck, forming a mane that transitioned decently into knee-length hair that grew so quickly she had to cut it every few weeks, otherwise it became unwieldy. Her face was the only thing that wasn’t chitinous, but it had its own problems; she had a beak as black as her hair, not exactly pronounced, but not exactly _not_ , where her lips and nose should’ve been, and eyes so clearly shaped after an owl’s she’d gotten a nickname out of it. She lacked eyebrows, though it didn’t bother her much, and her ears were _kinda_ there, if subsumed and melted against the sides of her head. She kept them hidden for the most part. Her torso was long, longer than her legs, but needed to be with the two extra sets of arms she had, not that she was in a position to complain about them. They made Tinkering - with a capital T - easier, even if Melanie wasn’t much of a fan of her spending most of her time in her room-cum-workshop.

Landing on the soft white carpet, Tailor drew her focus away from herself and to her projects. Across from her was clearly a loom - no matter how much Shamrock called it an abomination - which purred along, disgorging spools of silk that were then deposited into a wicker basket. Above that was the source of the silk, and probably the least ‘friendly’ part of her room: a cage full of biologically, for lack of a better word, _stitched_ insects. All of them had been melted partially into the cage and were fed through a tube, just to avoid the unfortunately _decent_ risk of a moth-cross-bark-spider-cross-butterfly getting loose and propagating itself somehow. She was pretty sure it was infertile, but risk wasn’t really her _thing_ , and this wasn’t even her area of specialty.

Honestly, who’d even have something as stupid as a bug power?

 _Fabrics_ were her specialty; she’d known that from the start. That’s how Melanie had found her, terrified and building her cocoon in some poor guy’s home in middle-city Boston, buried up to her arms in synthetic fabrics she'd salvaged from clothes and sheets, literally creating a quilted hive just to be sure she was safe. Safe from what? She wasn’t sure, she’d been dropped there half a day prior, completely bereft of memories and all the more terrified as a result.

Popping the three separate locks - _Melanie looked awkward at the request, but shrugged after a moment. “Sure, whatever helps.”_ \- and giving the doorknob a twist, Tailor carried herself out into the wide concrete hallway that made up their home-that-isn’t-home when doing work in Brockton Bay. Usually, they had an actual spot to stay, someplace down by the docks, an old fallout bunker built during the cold war, but when they were here on business instead of leisure - which was more often than not - Melanie demanded they stay at the Palanquin. It wasn’t like she was any less _safe_ here, the upper floors had been reinforced by herself personally, it was just less safe than the bunker.

She led herself down the long hallway, knocked twice on Shamrock and Gregor’s door, got a “we’re up!” from Shamrock and an inarticulate gurgle of complaint from Gregor, before heading down the stairs, hesitating but nevertheless knocking on Melanie’s door, listened for her curt and spry “good morning, Tailor” before finally letting herself head into the kitchen proper.

Maddie was already up, wearing close to nothing - _try not to blush, try not to blush_ \- and nursing a cup of coffee – she was one of the ones who _did_ dream and didn’t cope with what she saw-but-didn’t-saw. Newter was lazing over the bar, eyes lidded and heavy as he tried - and failed, repeatedly - to stay awake. He was clearly out of it enough for his tail, usually kept under control by him, to start wiggling and wagging, a sort of adorable shorthand for ‘content, but annoyed by how drowsy he was’.

“Tailor.” Maddie nodded aptly after taking another long, deep drink. She sounded weary, but she always did for a while after waking up.

She felt her right arm come up and wiggle in a wave, somewhat involuntarily. They weirdly did things she wanted them to do but didn’t pilot them to do. Melanie guessed it might have something to do with how intensely she Tinkered, that some of her movements might be unconsciously offloaded and done on their own. She personally thought it was more her inability to focus on any one thing, especially with her nervous twitches, but to each their own.

“Another?” Tailor didn’t much like her voice, it was too high, the one thing she truly found _foreign_ to herself, sounding closer to birdsong and completely unhindered by her not having much in the way of lips. Apparently most of the stuff her lips normally did had been transferred to some gland in her chest; it might be why it felt so _wrong._

Maddie nodded absently, pushing the emptied cup across. Another arm reached out to take it without her thinking too much about it, placing it beneath the patchwork coffee maker while a second came up to press a few buttons. The thing burbled and spat before steadying out in a stream of burning, caffeinated tar.

Melanie was the first one down, wearing an outfit Tailor had designed and was meant for business meetings. It had taken design cues from her costume - the mask, the padded vest, the engineering _flair_ that she found helplessly adorable - and overlaid them on gunmetal grey-and-white suit. Maddie had called it ‘a bit much’, but Melanie had taken to it and no matter _how_ jealous that tiny ball of not-Russian indignation was she’d never get a similar suit.

After she sat down at the table Shamrock appeared, looking all too peppy and with a certain sheen to her skin that told her why, and was followed shortly by Gregor, who was a bit like her in that he didn’t _remember_ his dreams but he did have long periods of sleepiness in between wake and slumber, even more so than Maddie.

“Labyrinth?” Tailor found herself asking, sparing a glance at Shamrock while she passed the filled cup off to Maddie, getting a mumbled ‘thanks, birdy’ in return.

Shamrock glanced up towards the stairs, then back. “She’ll be down. She’s lucid today, but it’s almost one of her bad days. I don’t think she’ll need an escort, but…”

“You’d feel better with one?” Melanie, now with two pieces of toast, supplied. Shamrock nodded shakily, glancing at Gregor for support who, perhaps in his own loving way, kinda just _glooped_ against her shoulder. They were weirdly cute together.

Picking out her own breakfast from the fridge - a bowl of mixed nuts, dried berries, and other grains, some of the few things her body could actually manage to eat - Tailor plopped herself down at the table, closer to Maddie than the drowsy, blubbery Gregor but far enough away from Newter that Spitfire could sit down closer to him. She’d be down a bit later, she slept even harder than everyone else, though for reasons Melanie had only described as “a sleep cycle to end all sleep cycles.”

“Tailor?” Melanie called, drawing her gaze. She loved that name, for some reason. She imagined it might be close to her own name or maybe a last name, or maybe a profession. It was just _comfortably familiar_ , a bit like how ‘birdie’ and ‘owly’ was. She might’ve smiled if she had the face for it.

“Want me to be with Labyrinth today?” That got her a nod from Melanie. Maddie nudged one of her arms that had apparently reached over. She drew it back in but not before the other girl could thread their hands together. It was weird how _warm_ people were, in comparison to herself, even if her face and ears-but-not-ears were burning just as hot as Maddie’s hand at the moment. “Sure, who are you meeting today, by the way?”

Melanie took on a posture that Tailor had come to call ‘business formal’. “Apparently,” she started slowly, toying with the piece of toast on her plate. “Someone pissed off Lung enough that he torched half the docks and maimed most of the Undersiders, we might even end up taking a few in.”

“I thought you hated Lisa?” Maddie butted in, her grip suddenly quite a bit tighter, almost painfully so. She did her best to squeeze the other girl’s hand, hoping to pass over her assurance. The death grip waned some.

Melanie furrowed her brows in a way that was cute, though the slight tint of anger and heat and a bunch of mixing emotions were almost equally as fascinating to look at. “We… have our issues,” she said slowly, pursing her lips. “But I didn’t want her to be hurt like that. We’ll offer our hand, Coil be damned – Lisa already said Grue would probably be willing to join, and maybe Bitch, if we pitch it correctly.”

“Have you guys seen a couple’s counselor?” Shamrock blurted. Gregor laughed, or at least she assumed it was a laugh, and Maddie’s hand relaxed all but entirely.

Melanie grunted a noise of complaint and went back to her bread, apparently deciding the conversation wasn’t worth it.

It would take a little while longer for Labyrinth to come down - still clutching the quilt Tailor had made for her when she first arrived, a sort-of tributary gift to show she meant no harm - and even longer yet for the table to stop ribbing Melanie and her poor choices, but by the time that was all over they began to plan as they always did. Plan and plan and plan, contingencies inside of contingencies, all in the name of, at least this time, collecting someone new.

Who knows? Maybe she might even make another friend.


End file.
